A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  And this time when DeMarco read his friend’s words, he felt something like a punch in the stomach, not hard, but hard enough to make him catch his breath. Hard enough to make the room begin to waver around him, and grow watery around the edges, so that he had to blink to clear his eyes to read the second piece again.

  Nature waits, but she will not hold her breath for you. Do you think you can ignore her like the old friend whose emails you never answer? Do you think you can turn your back to her as you do with your partner, when you are deep inside yourself and ego-blind to the needs of others?

  Nature always waits; never tires of waiting. But if you ignore her correspondence too long, if you turn your back on too many nights and mornings and sweetly scented gloamings, it is you who will grow cold and stiff and numb and dry, not her. And when you become an empty husk, every strand of golden corn silk gone, blowing brittle and lost across last year’s stubble, she will watch, will even help you find a dark corner where you can turn to dust, but, like the wife you ignore or the husband you deny, like the old friend who will eventually lose all memory of your face, she will not hold her breath for you; she will not sigh.

  And now, too, in the mirror of those words, DeMarco acknowledged his regret, an ache left unsatisfied too long, that boyish pleasure he’d so often sought in the company of trees and meadows, that peculiar elevation of his spirit and the reassurance that he need never feel alone.

  There was no apparent connection between the pieces, yet DeMarco felt certain a connection existed, a resonance with particular application to him. He could not have articulated the nature of that resonance, only that he was moved by it, as by a passage of music without words. Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” for example. Mozart’s “Lacrimosa.”

  His rational mind told him that Huston had not intended to connect the pieces or he would have written them on the same page, and probably wrote each of them on a different day. Yet still the pieces cohered for DeMarco, and they were all he wanted to read that night.

  He closed the composition book and placed it in the box. Jayme looked his way. He said, smiling softly, “May I make love to you, my beauty?”

  She blinked. Then smiled too. Closed the cover on her notebook and placed it in the box.

  He set it on the floor. When he turned back to her, she asked, “Did you read something sexy?”

  He nodded, and touched her as he spoke. “Your eyes. Your nose. Your mouth. Your neck…”

  Fifty-Eight

  In the morning she awoke to the scents of coffee and fried ham. She found the panties and camisole she had taken off, and pulled them on again. Went to the bathroom, washed her face and hands, brushed her teeth, combed her hair.

  Downstairs, the kitchen table was set for breakfast. DeMarco was scooping ice cubes from the freezer and dumping them into a plastic bag. At his feet was his big blue cooler, and in the cooler were clear plastic containers of olives, pickles, cheese, sliced apples and pears, a tray of deep-fried chicken, two sweet rolls, bottles of water, two multigrain hard rolls.

  She said, “Did you rob a grocery store?”

  “Walmart is open all night,” he said.

  “You drove to Walmart already?”

  He grinned. “Should we take a bottle of wine?”

  “To where?”

  “I was thinking that if we get to the Kinzua Sky Walk early, we can have it all to ourselves. I haven’t been up there since they put in the glass floor. And then maybe a picnic in the woods. Does that sound okay?”

  “Sounds wonderful. What brought this on?”

  He kept grinning. “Did you hear it raining last night?”

  “No. When?”

  “Just a soft steady drizzle most of the night. This morning the grass was glinting with a thousand little diamonds.”

  She cocked her head, her hip. Her look of amazement made him smile. Made him feel something else too, started something moving around inside his blood. It felt like an army of leaf cutter ants converging on the philodendron in his crotch.

  He wished he had the words to say how much he adored her, how much he needed her. He adored her more than a thousand words could express. He needed her more than everything Hemingway had ever written between the lines.

  He patted his lap. “Get some coffee and have a seat. No work today, okay? Today is a day to just be.”

  Fifty-Nine

  The work was important; he had no doubt of it. But this was important too, to stand above the treetops, his hand in hers, as the little creek, barely visible through the ground-hugging mist, trickled three hundred feet below. The sky walk ended midway across the gorge. Rusting girders and splintered beams from the fallen half still lay scattered over the gorge and up the far hillside. He looked out across the emptiness, which was not empty at all but full of color and light and scent and birdsong.

  He had come here twice as a younger man. First when the railroad bridge was still intact, and if you dared to walk the ties across the gorge you had to be prepared to turn and run if the rails started to vibrate. This was in the winter, a few days after his mother’s funeral, when he didn’t know whether he would run or not if the trestle began to tremble. If he ran, he would be sent back to Panama, where he had done things he would not have believed he was capable of doing, and had seen things he wished he could scrub from his memory.

  Many years later he came again after a second funeral, this one in the fall. A tornado had ripped away half the bridge, leaving broken ties and snapped rails hanging three hundred feet in the air. There were no guardrails back then, only a warning sign, and if you did not care about what might happen, you could make your way out as far as the last intact tie, and you could stand there full of rage and the deepest, blackest grief a human being can know. You could fantasize about stepping off the rails and into the air, and wonder how long you would remain conscious, and whether it would be better to fall feet or head first.

  If you are lucky, you feel more rage than despair. Rage will eventually carry you back across the rails to your car. But that is where your luck ends, because it is impossible to leave the rage behind when you drive away, even if it is of negative value in the valley below.

  Those times, he hoped, were years long gone. In the interim, a group of people had saved what was left of the bridge and raised enough money to turn it into a tourist attraction. There was a plank floor now and sturdy railing and a glass panel you could stand atop and imagine you were standing on air. The train no longer ran, and the danger of falling to your death was slight unless you made the effort to climb up over the railing and throw yourself off. Eventually someone would do that, because there was never a shortage of despair in this life, never a dearth of sorrow.

  Still, he was glad they had come. Jayme clutched his hand the whole way out to the end of the sky walk, squeezed his fingers hard when she stood over the glass pane. He had been right about getting there early. A thin mist still hugged the ground, and the light on the treetops was orange and soothing. Theirs was the only car in the parking lot, their whispered voices the only intrusion.

  “My heart is racing,” Jayme said. Small black shapes he thought were probably crows were clustered in a high oak maybe a quarter mile away. An invisible jay cackled nearby. A slight breeze stirred only the tops of the trees. Only silence rose up from the stream and the darkness beneath the leaves.

  It was often necessary to work day after day with your eyes to the microscope, head bent to the smallest of details as you tried to make sense of mere cells of information, but it was tedious work and it often made you blind to life beyond the glass slide. So it was good to stand above the treetops now and then, to fill your lungs with sky, and to gaze again into the far distance where heaven and earth were joined.

  The air was sweet and clean at three hundred feet, and for a few moments he imagined that if he had enough faith he could step into that air and walk across it to th
e far side of the gorge. As a boy he had often imagined the same thing, that faith was stronger than gravity or any chasm no matter how wide, and faith would hold him aloft, would allow him to fly if only he could call up an unshakable belief.

  He leaned over the ledge, peered into the mist at the twisted girders and splintered beams. Yes, it was a long way down, all right. But he had already been a long way down. Almost to the bottom. He had hung there, a few feet above the rest of the rusting wreckage, for most of thirteen years. And never thought he would ever be up in the light again. Yet here he was. All thanks to a strawberry blond who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Not that he expected there would be nothing but light from here on in. He was too much of a realist to believe that. Gravity would eventually seize him again. Sooner or later, the darkness would latch on to his ankles and attempt to drag him down. But he was higher now. He knew what to hold on to. Hell, sometimes she almost made him believe he could levitate.

  Thinking of Jayme, smiling to himself, his skin began to tingle. A feeling spread across his skin then, a tingling not from the air or the mist but within, so that he felt it all up and down his arms and into his hands, across his chest and back, upward into his neck and face and downward through every inch of flesh and into his toes. The tingling covered him with chill bumps but warmed him deep inside, made the air appear to sparkle and filled the weeds below and the distant trees with tiny sparkles too, and not as something separate but as a part of him, and him a part of all of it—the earth and everything that grew or lived on it, the sky and every cloud and star and particle of air, the radiance within and without him all the same radiance but with a trillion eyes beholding it. He was both enormous and microscopic and there was nothing wrong with that. It was all fine and right and exactly as it was meant to be.

  It was the strangest feeling he had ever experienced and he did not want it to end. For those few moments, he did not have to reach for Jayme because she was within and without him too, her own field of tiny lights but integral to him as well, and he to her. He stood very still and soaked it all up, did not want to move or speak or do anything else at all, for nothing would ever compare to this wonderment.

  And then it began to fade. He tried not to blink or even breathe, yet the twinkling lights faded out one by one, until there was no tingling left and only a soft glow of sunrise backlighting the wall of fog atop the hills. But the reassurance of those few moments lingered. The certainty that everything was okay, that everything was fine and right and always would be.

  Then he was just a man again, separate and small. Yet changed, he hoped, forever. He hoped those moments would never leave him. That he would remember them whenever he needed them most.

  There was no way to explain any of it to Jayme. No words could capture that feeling.

  He turned to her and asked, “Want to see me levitate?”

  “I do not,” she said. “It sounds dangerous. What do you plan to do—climb up and stand on the railing?”

  All he could do was smile. It must have seemed a silly, boyish smile, but that was okay too. He said, “Race you back to the car?”

  “Go!” she said, and was off and running, sprinting hard.

  He followed along behind her, strolling leisurely, in no hurry. God, how he loved to watch her move.

  Sixty

  On the ride home after the morning stroll high in the air, and after a long hike followed by a picnic in the woods, then the nap and slowly waking to lie on the blanket and gaze at the sky through the high mosaic of leaves, after all this, in the late afternoon, they stopped in the little town of Mount Jewett for cappuccinos to go, and spoke of the murder investigation for the first time all day.

  “Let’s start with the other boy,” DeMarco said. “The one we haven’t interviewed yet.”

  “Connor McBride,” Jayme said. “You think Olcott would get his address for us? The registrar probably won’t give it to a couple of gumshoes like us.”

  He smiled. “Gumshoes. That makes me think of a pair of Hush Puppies I used to have. Gum soles. The first pair of new shoes I ever bought for myself. 1986, I think.”

  “Weren’t you the fashionista!”

  “Hey, they looked good with brown corduroy pants.”

  She shook her head, her eyes sparkling. “I’ll grab the coffee. You call Ollie.”

  “He’s Ollie now?”

  “We’re tight,” she told him. “Almost as close as me and Fascetti.”

  He was still chuckling when he pressed the telephone icon. Olcott answered during the voice recording. “Sorry!” he said. “Had to get the burgers off the heat.”

  DeMarco could hear somebody’s lawn mower in the background. “Am I interrupting dinner?” he asked.

  “Not quite. Just now laid the wieners on. What can I do for you?”

  “We found another one of Gillespie’s students we’d like to interview. He was at Samantha Lewis’s memorial. Any chance you could contact the registrar in the morning, get us his address and phone number?”

  “Happy to try,” Olcott said. “What’s his name?”

  “McBride. First name Connor.”

  “Ha, that’s a familiar name around here.”

  “You know the kid?”

  “I know McBride. Quite a family.”

  “How so?” DeMarco asked.

  “Two sisters are well-known escorts, I guess you could say. Three brothers and the old man did stints for solicitation, possession, possession with intent, breaking and entering, you name it. I remember arresting the old man for abuse of a corpse. Kept his wife in the freezer for eight months before somebody reported it.”

  “Did he kill her?”

  “Naw, natural causes. Just couldn’t stand the thought of parting with her SSI check.”

  “Oy,” DeMarco said. “Anything on the kid?”

  “Not that I know of. Maybe he’s the black sheep of the family. Actually trying to make something of himself.”

  “Let’s hope so,” DeMarco said.

  “Get back to you in the morning, Sergeant. Gotta run. The grill’s smoking.”

  “Many thanks.”

  Jayme stood nearby, holding two twenty-ounce cappuccinos in paper cups. “How’s our boy?” she asked.

  “I think his wiener was burning.”

  “Oh, DeMarco,” she said, and headed for the door.

  Sixty-One

  True to his word, Olcott called DeMarco at 9:07 Monday morning with Connor McBride’s address. Olcott had no idea how many other family members shared the residence, or if any of them were related to those McBrides he had dealt with professionally. “There are a ton of McBrides in this city alone,” he said. “And no shortage over your way either. No father is listed as contact for the boy. Mother’s name is Victoria. I ran both her name and the kid’s but they came up clean. No arrests.”

  “Glad to hear it,” DeMarco said.

  “Keep us in the loop, okay?”

  “The minute we find a loop, you’ll be in it. Speaking of things loopy, how’s your partner doing these days?”

  “Ha,” Olcott said. “He sends you his regards.”

  “Should I have them tested for explosives?”

  “Seriously,” Olcott said, speaking more softly now, “if you come up with anything conclusive…”

  “What’s this angle you guys are working? Something about an old girlfriend?”

  “Turns out Costa used to date a waitress from the restaurant Talarico was known to frequent. Apparently she also did some typing for Talarico from time to time, some kind of secretarial work. Our informant claims that Talarico was doing her on the side, and Costa found out about it.”

  “You trust your informant?”

  “As far as any informant can be trusted.”

  “No sign of the girlfriend?”

  “She’s in the wind
. Disappeared a few weeks after Talarico’s and Brogan’s bodies turned up on the golf course.”

  “In the wind or in the ground,” DeMarco said. “Or in the water. Which leaves you where?”

  “Pounding pavement.”

  “I hear you. Next time I sign on for a job, remind me to get paid by the mile. Thanks for the address for the kid.”

  “No problema. Talk to you later,” Olcott said.

  Breakfast had been over for most of ninety minutes, dishes cleared and cleaned. DeMarco and Jayme, energized from their day of rest, were ready to get down to business again. He checked that the front door was locked, grabbed two bottles of water from the refrigerator, and joined Jayme on the back porch, where she sat bouncing the car key in her hand while staring at the half-finished brick path to the garage he had started years earlier.

  The morning was gray, the air heavy. He inhaled the scent of skunk. “You smell that?” he asked.

  “How could I not smell it?” She stood, and waited for him to come down off the porch.

  But he remained standing with his back to the open door, scanning his yard for small mounds of disturbed earth. “They come through here and dig for grubs. Spreading around mothballs or cayenne pepper is supposed to keep them away.”

  “Guess I’ll have to stop eating the grass,” she said.

  He looked down at her. “Ready to roll?”

  “Been ready.”

  He pulled the back door shut, jerked the handle to check the lock, and told her, “Public housing apartment, downtown.”

  She nodded and started down the brick path. “You ever plan to finish this? We could knock it off together in a day.”

  “Or plant a For Sale sign in the yard. Less work.”

  “You’re ready to sell?”

  “All I need is Laraine’s okay.”